Harold puhuu täyttä asiaa II

Koska Sepä Se toteutti uhkauksensa ja poistatti aloitukseni, jossa käsiteltiin kreationistien epärehellistä keskustelutaktiikkaa, mm. epämiellyttävien aloitusten poistoa (ja mihin ylläpito jostakin kummallisesta syystä suostuu), niin laitan tuon Haroldin tärkeän asian uudestaan:

"Creationists have taught me why America is “divided”.

You can’t have a reasonable conversation with someone who denies physical reality and logic.

Creationists, and many other people, operate in a different way than I do.

If something challenges what I wish to be true, I take the challenge seriously.

Creationists are, at a deep level, intensely cynical, in fact outright nihilistic. The ones that aren’t stop being creationists. If something challenges what they wish to be true, they simply deny and attack it, evidence and logic be damned.

Creationists begin with a usually unconscious commitment to pushing their own social and political agenda. Because parts of it are too inflammatory to openly push, they push “Biblical literalism” as dog whistle code. They think others are fooled by this, because they use it to fool, or at least assuage themselves. I know that because I’ve asked them questions like “what should happen to gay people” directly, and seen that they literally, I mean literally, can’t answer the question. I’ve had a creationist literally beg me to stop asking that because the answer he would have to give sounds “too brutal”. They’re like Dr Strangelove half-trying to suppress the nazi salute and half trying to do it (no comparison to nazis intended; it’s the psychological state I refer to). Their self-serving bias, which is actually incorrect, but powerful, is that they themselves benefit if “Genesis is literally true” (or in the ID bastardization, if “evolution is somehow false but we can’t say what’s true, wink, wink”).

As nihilistic authoritarians, they set out to advocate that what they wish to be true, is true. Any trick that can work for a few seconds, on themselves or others, is employed. I mentioned above that they focus on science denial, while the real agenda is a harsh social and political ideology. When “defending” science denial, they routinely use straw man misrepresentations, quote mining, arguments from authority, non sequitur arguments, ad hominem fallacy, false accusations, false analogies, censorship of their critics wherever possible, and repetition of arguments proven false elsewhere in front of naive audiences.

It doesn’t matter because their goal is not to convince anyone with reason. It’s to “win”.

They can’t understand that the rest of us are any different. They have no fear that “evolutionists” might be saying something that is true, because they project their own behavior onto others. At some level, perhaps not conscious, they know that they will say any self-contradictory, factually untrue, or illogical thing to deny science, if they think they can get away with it. So they assume we are the same, but on the opposite side - just saying anything, however false or illogical, to deny their claims.

They have total disrespect for others. If you stand in the way of their wish fulfillment, you must just be a rival authoritarian. No need to even consider your arguments. Just use every verbal trick in the book, most or all taken from the lexicon of con men, most or all observable in slight variation in ads for rip-off products, to try to shut the other guy down.

I comment here to try to enlighten third party readers. The deeply committed science deniers can’t be reached by comments."